Revered Roots: Ancestral Teachings and Wisdom of Wild, Edible, and Medicinal Plants - Hardcover

Bird, LoriAnn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0760393257 ISBN 13: 9780760393253

Publisher: Cool Springs Press, 2025

Synopsis

With Indigenous Métis herbalist LoriAnn Bird as your guide, connect with the ancestral wisdom of over 90 wild edible and medicinal plants from across North America. 

A purposeful and powerful reference to the lessons, nourishment, healing, and history of our “plant teachers,” Revered Roots shares guidance on exploring, gathering, and reclaiming these long-revered plants as food and medicine. Separated into two sections, LoriAnn first reveals her own journey to understanding and respecting our plant elders. She offers teachings and lessons about remembering our relationship to the plants around us and our responsibility to the earth that sustains us.

The second part of the book is filled with insightful illustrated plant profiles detailing the identification, uses, and Indigenous folklore of some of the continent’s most treasured ancestral plants. Included are edible and medicinal bark, berries, and buds from trees and shrubs, as well as foliage, flowers, and fronds from herbs, “weeds,” and wildflowers; some native to the continent, others introduced generations ago. 

Learn about the gifts our Rooted Nation of plants has to offer, including: 

• Evergreen tips from spruces, pines, and firs 
• Hawthorn berries, leaves, and flowers 
• Plantain seeds and foliage 
• Oswego tea leaves and blooms
• Slippery elm bark
• Motherwort flowers, stems, and leaves
• Black cohosh roots and rhizomes 
• Marshmallow root
• Cottonwood buds and bark
• Plus dozens more

Reclaiming our natural rhythms and connections to the earth we walk on is essential to our health and well-being, both as individuals and as a community. One simple way to do that is by appreciating, respecting, and seeking to understand the plants around us.

About this title

About the Author

LoriAnn Bird is an Indigenous Métis herbalist and educator with a deep knowledge of wild, medicinal, and edible plants. She is a descendant from the T’suu tina, Dene, Cree, Nipissing, and Anishinaabe Peoples, mixed with French, Swedish and Celtic ancestry. She was born and raised on the lands of the Squamish people, near Vancouver, Canada, overlooking the Salish Sea on the Pacific Northwest Coast of Turtle Island.

Through Indigenous ways of knowing and pedagogies, LoriAnn leads people of diverse backgrounds in reconnecting to the Earth’s wisdom. LoriAnn created Earth Awareness Realized Through Health and Company in 2013 to share First People’s perspectives on wild, edible, and medicinal plants. Her practices include plant identification walks, illustration and plant medicine workshops, homemade products for the skin, consulting on garden design, and public speaking.

In 2022 LoriAnn and her friend Laura Cisneros founded InHarmony InNature Collective to reclaim and share ancient arts, like dreaming, the cosmos, moon cycle gardening, medicine making, and more. She walks gently and teaches primarily on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, as well as neighboring Coast Salish nations.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cool Springs Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0760393257
• ISBN 13: 9780760393253
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240